Gerard Manley Hopkins
(1844–1889)

Though Gerald Manley Hopkins saw none of his work published during his lifetime, he was nevertheless the most innovative poet of the Victorian Age. Born in Essex, just outside London, Hopkins was the oldest of nine children in a well-educated and prosperous family. While still in grammar school, Hopkins began writing poetry, a practice that he maintained throughout his years at Oxford, where he also studied the classics.

It was during his third year at Oxford that Hopkins decided to become a Catholic, much to the dismay of his parents, who were devout Anglicans. Upon being accepted into the Society of Jesus in 1868, he symbolically burned his early poems, resolving, "to write no more." Though he remained true to his word for the next seven years, Hopkins continued to keep detailed notebooks—as he had done ever since childhood—that recorded his fascination with words and his love of nature.

In 1874, as part of his preparation for the priesthood, Hopkins went to St. Bueno's College in Wales to study theology. There he learned to speak Welsh. He also began again to write poetry, though of a sort that was different not only from his earlier verse but from anything ever before done in English. Encouraged by a Jesuit superior, Hopkins wrote a long poem about a tragic shipwreck in which five nuns had drowned. "The Wreck of the Deutschland," apart from the great emotional power packed in to it, was the first poem in which Hopkins used what he called "sprung rhythm." This is a system of versification in which accented syllables are grouped in emphatic patterns somewhat like those of Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse. The resulting meter is quite different from conventional English meter, in which accented and unaccented syllables alternate in regular patterns.

In 1877, the year he was ordained a priest, Hopkins wrote some of his best and best-known poems, including "God's Grandeur," "Pied Beauty," and "Hurrahing in Harvest." Like most of Hopkins's poems, the goal of these was to reveal and glorify the individual essence—or "inscape," as he called it—of everything in nature.

Hopkins served as a parish priest and missionary preacher among the poor in London, Liverpool, and Glasgow. Despite his total dedication to his calling, long hours and a tendency toward perfectionism left him depressed and in poor health. He died of typhoid fever one month before his forty-fifth birthday.

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